Firefighters announced Friday night they would spend much of the weekend containing and mopping up an 8 to 10 acre blaze in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Officials responded to a structure fire Friday afternoon in Boulder Creek (Santa Cruz County) and some residents were forced to evacuate, authorities said.

The blaze, called the Bear Fire, started at 11:01 a.m. and stretched over 25 acres to burn east of Middleton Drive, according to Cal Fire. The agency’s Twitter account for the Santa Cruz area noted that the fire has extended into the surrounding vegetation at Bear Creek Road and Mayfair Road.

#BearFire in Boulder Creek, Santa Cruz County is 15 acres burning east of Middleton Road in the timber. The affected residences have been evacuated. There are multiple resources at scene including multiple air tankers and helicopters fighting the fire.

By 2:50pm on Friday, the fire had been beaten back to eight to 10 acres with 50 percent containment, said Katherine Gault, of Cal Fire’s Santa Cruz Unit. Evacuation orders were lifted several hours after residents were cleared from the area.

Officials with the Cal Fire San Mateo-Santa Cruz Unit announced just after 8 p.m. on Friday that firefighters would work to contain the blaze and mop up the area into Saturday and possibly into Sunday.

Holly Honderich is a reporting fellow with The Chronicle’s politics team. Originally from Toronto, Canada, Holly graduated from Queen’s University in political science and is completing her master’s in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School. Before joining The Chronicle, Holly wrote for the Toronto Star and, most recently, the BBC’s DC bureau, where she completed a reporting trip to the Mexico-US border to cover protests to US immigration policy. Her work has been featured in USA Today, Illinois Channel and UPI.